Principle 1: Students should receive explicit and systematic instruction ...
...in decoding, vocabulary, fluency, concept knowledge, and comprehension strategy use.
Explicit instruction involves clear explanations and step-by-step teaching that gradually leads students from introduction and modeling of material, through practice, to independence.
Systematic instruction is carefully sequenced, with new concepts and skills building on each other over time.
"One of the greatest tools available to us in this pursuit [teaching] is explicit instruction—instruction that is systematic, direct, engaging, and success oriented. The effectiveness of explicit instruction has been validated again and again in research involving both general education and special education." (Archer & Hughes, 2011)
This may seem obvious to the casual observer of literacy instruction. Teachers should teach, right? Unfortunately, many well-regarded reading programs and experts exhort teachers to shy away from teacher-directed instruction. They say that reading and writing should be "caught, not taught." What happens, then, for those students who don't catch on to the basics of literacy?
Dig Deeper into Principle 1: Click to read "Putting Students on the Path to Learning: The Case for Fully Guided Instruction" by Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller.
Principle 2: Background knowledge is a key element of reading comprehension, and therefore, should be built with intention.
"In the mathematically rigorous formulation of quantum mechanics, the state of a quantum mechanical system is a vector belonging to a (separable) complex Hilbert space . This vector is postulated to be normalized under the Hilbert space inner product." (From "Quantum Mechanics" on Wikipedia).
If you're like me, you can read all of the words in those two sentences. If you're also like me, and lack a lot of knowledge of quantum mechanics, it's likely you didn't comprehend beyond the most basic meaning of the sentences. (It's about formulas? And maybe there was someone named Hilbert? Who had a space named after him?). If you are an ace at quantum mechanics, you probably understood it all.
That's because background knowledge has repeatedly shown to have a big impact on comprehension. In a now-famous 1988 study, Recht and Leslie found that kids with knowledge of the topic of a text can comprehend the text regardless of their status as a "struggling" reader. Kids who were considered good readers, but didn't have knowledge of the topic -- baseball, in the study -- found comprehension challenging.
Findings such as these are both hopeful and daunting. Hopeful, because students with academic background knowledge can tackle more challenging texts than we previously thought. Daunting, because we spend a huge amount of our school day teaching "comprehension skills," while science and social studies are often neglected. In order to help all kids comprehend, we must intentionally build knowledge of the world around them, while also accessing students' own cultural literacies.
Dig Deeper into Principle 2: Click to read "How Knowledge Helps: It Speeds and Strengthens Reading Comprehension, Learning--And Thinking" by Daniel Willingham..
Principle 3: All students, regardless of reading ability, deserve and benefit from teacher-supported access to on-grade-level texts.
Contrary to much conventional wisdom within the education community, research suggests that once student reach about a second grade reading level, they can grow more through reading harder texts than teachers have traditionally placed in front of students.
But wait! you might be thinking. Isn’t there lots of research showing that students achieve the most growth when they read a lot of engaging, self-selected texts that are “just right?”(There are different formulations of what “just right” means, but it generally refers to texts that kids can read with 90-95% accuracy.)
Well… not exactly. The idea that reading a lot of enjoyable, “just right” texts leads to reading growth seemed so intuitive that, for a long time, it didn’t get a good, sciencey workout. When researchers decided to study how text difficulty impacts learning, they found that reading more difficult texts (with scaffolds) either benefited students, or conveyed no disadvantage. When we restrict students to books they can already read, we are denying the opportunity to even attempt to meet the standards of their grade levels. Providing the right scaffolding can lead to all readers finding success with challenging text.
Principle 4: Effective teachers are responsive to students’ needs, strengths, interests, and cultures.
When you hear "responsive" you might think of cultural responsiveness; that is definitely a part of being a responsive teacher. However, there's a lot more to being responsive. It means paying attention throughout the day so that you aren't only responsive in the macro, but responsive in micro ways. Responsive teachers listen to individual students read and discuss, watch for cues to emotional states, and are prepared to address misconceptions.
When it comes to cultural responsiveness, strong teachers think of culture not in monolithic ways, but through listening and learning to their particular students. Often, young people have a culture that is different from that of their elders, because they are influenced by the state of the world around them. This means that our view of students' cultural backgrounds evolves with our knowledge of them, and that even if we share certain characteristics with our students, we know that our culture won't be exactly the same.
Principle 5: Research-informed practice changes as new research contributes to the field of teaching.
Think of all the ways that technology has changed over the course of your life. When I was a kid, I had a rotary princess phone. Later, we had a cordless phone -- you couldn't go too far from the phone base if you wanted to keep reception. As a young adult, I got a small cell phone and texted using T9. I had a Sidekick just like Veronica Mars. And now, of course, I have a smartphone. (If you don't know what any of these technologies are, you're younger than me and should Google them to have a laugh!)
When we consider how phones have changed over the years, it makes sense that other sorts of science will have changed extensively as well. But many of us teach the way we did in our first or second year - it it ain't broke, we might reason, why fix it? But what we have been doing, as a field of educators, isn't working nearly well enough for many of our students. It IS broken in may ways. To that end, we should try to learn as much as we can -- and we should change our practice as new research emerges.
Dig Deeper Into Principle 5: Click here to read "It's Not Enough to Know Better" by Margaret Goldberg (or any of the other posts on her blog).